Attic uses the full path to back up. This is not always useful or wanted. In many cases I might be backing up the contents of a user's home directory, or files for a website or application, which may later be restored to a different path. In those cases, the absolute path is not only irrelevant, but annoying - it should be possible to extract at any point, from any backup set, consistently, regardless of path changes that may have happened in between (e.g. a website moving to a different server and having a different base path).

I would not mind there being some kind of warning when backing up or restoring a set which uses relative paths - perhaps, though, this would only be needed if extracting the backup to the filesystem root (i.e. /). Otherwise, it should be assumed that the user has read the manual and is using the relative path options because they know how to.

_Comparison note__: Bup allows this sort of thing, e.g. most usefully through its --graft option._